La dolce vita turns sour as Italy faces up to being old and poor - Times Online - The Diigo Meta page

• 27 Dec 07
  

  Yule Heibel

  - relates to my blog entry Dec.23/07,"High Rents=Mamma's Boys?" Interesting comments thread, with many agreeing w/ article, others saying that it's not so bad. In either case, stagnation seems to be setting in (symptom of what?, political corruption?, more than that?). Sounds like a Donna Leon mystery come to life (as fiction, that's great, but as reality, that's not a compliment...).
  One of the comments came from http://www.ilquiquiri.com/ who pointed to (his?) YouTube video of his region festering under the garbage strike (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6gpnIK-WY0) : very graphic.

  corruption development italy socialcritique times_online

  • 
    Yet, at home, Italians are consumed with a sense of domestic decline. “When an
    entire country goes into crisis over the ‘who are we and where are we going’
    debate, it means we are reaching new heights of hysteria,” the writer
    Umberto Eco said. “This explosion of provincialism is truly painful.
    Personally I feel depressed.”
    

    
    So do many of his fellow countrymen. There is a sense that while the past is
    Italy’s glory, it is also its prison, with politics and business dominated
    by a gerontocracy and the younger entrepreneurs and politicians held back.

    • 

      Yule Heibel on 2007-12-27

      - you can read/ understand Eco's comment as saying that the self-flagellation is "hysteria," is overblown, and is not based in reality (i.e., that he's contradicting the article's premise)
  • “The problem is that the leaders of our governing class are greybeards
    whereas, say, Spain’s are practically kids,” says Michele Salvati, a leading
    economist. At this year’s Miss Italia beauty contest, the contestants were
    all in their teens while the average age of the judges — who made headlines
    by arguing over whether a girl’s bottom should be judged part of her charm —
    was 70.
  • 6 more annotations...
  • • When Larry Gagosian, the dynamic American art dealer, opened a new modern art
      gallery in Rome last week, some critics accused him of making money instead
      of praising an attempt to put Rome at the cutting edge of contemporary art.

    • 
      Vincenzo Cremonini, 44, who has expanded his meat-producing business at Módena
      to include railway and motorway catering — including the new Eurostar
      service from St Pancras — identifies three other factors holding Italy back:
      bureaucracy, the slow judicial system, which is used by protesters to hold
      up modernising initiatives such as the Turin to Lyons high-speed railway,
      and the “selfperpetuating political elite”.
      

      
      A book on Italy’s cocooned elite, La Casta (The Caste), a runaway bestseller
      this year, pointed out that Italy had the highest number of official
      chauffeur-driven cars in Europe, and that the presidential palace, the
      Quirinal, cost four times as much to run as Buckingham Palace.

      • 

        Yule Heibel on 2007-12-27

        - more than Buckingham Palace? That's crazy.
    • The workforce at Alitalia, itself a symbol of the Italian malaise, is
      threatening a Christmas strike over the proposed sale of the troubled
      national airline to Air France-KLM. Even La Scala opera house in Milan is
      disrupted regularly by industral unrest. “Italy needs a Margaret Thatcher,”
      Francesco Caltagirone, one of Italy’s top entrepreneurs, said yesterday. “We
      need rigour and deregulation, a leader who will force Italians to make
      sacrifices.”
    • Even the Italian nuclear family, once the bulwark (along with the Catholic
      Church) of Italian society, is in decline, with growing divorce rates, a low
      birthrate and the rise of single parenthood. The family still provides a
      haven for young Italians, many of whom live at home until they are 30 — but
      this, too, holds Italy back, as those who should be carving a niche for
      themselves opt instead for Mamma’s cooking and laundry services. Many do so
      because they cannot afford to make their own way.

      • 

        Yule Heibel on 2007-12-27

        - they live at home b/c they can't afford to move into their own place(s)
    • The result is that Italians are the least happy people in Europe, according to
      a poll conducted for the University of Cambridge by Luisa Corrado, of the
      University of Rome. Danes turned out to be the happiest. Tellingly, in
      Denmark 64 per cent said that they trusted their parliament. In Italy it was
      only 36 per cent.
    • After the Second World War, millions of Italians emigrated in search of a
      better life. The movement is now the other way, with nearly four million
      immigrants in Italy. “The problem is that a country like Spain sees
      immigrants as useful workers, whereas in Italy the headlines tell us they
      are all criminals who go round robbing and stabbing Italians,” Carlo
      Bastasin, an economist, said.

Public Stiky Notes

• 
  Yule Heibel on 2007-12-27
  - you can read/ understand Eco's comment as saying that the self-flagellation is "hysteria," is overblown, and is not based in reality (i.e., that he's contradicting the article's premise)
• 
  Yule Heibel on 2007-12-27
  - more than Buckingham Palace? That's crazy.
• 
  Yule Heibel on 2007-12-27
  - they live at home b/c they can't afford to move into their own place(s)

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